Amazon knows how to improve website user experience and conversions, how to upsell and cross-sell, and how to be efficient at low margins. By integrating its retail offerings into Expedia’s fabric, Amazon could potentially change the online travel consumer marketplace.

Some hoteliers would welcome another major OTA player like Amazon to increase competition and lessen dependency on two and in some markets, on a single OTA. Others would be fearful that a giant online player such as Amazon, with its established reputation for low cost and reliable service, and its “sticky” loyalty membership and online retailing capabilities, would further erode the OTA vs. direct booking status quo and affect customer ownership in a negative way.

Overall, hoteliers should NOT be concerned by an organic entry of Amazon into the online travel space. As mentioned above, it would take Amazon unsurmountable efforts and resources to build an OTA type of retail travel product from scratch.

However, if Amazon decides to buy an existing OTA player and build a global travel retail empire on this new acquisition’s platform, then hoteliers should be concerned. For example, Expedia could be one such acquisition target. In today’s world, with $17.4 billion market capitalization, Expedia is on the smaller size, especially compared to Booking Holdings’ market cap of $105 billion.

The cost to hotels for groups and meetings has been on the rise in the U.S. in recent years. According to a report from hotel benchmarking company Kalibri Labs, the cost, if left unchecked, likely will double by 2022.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer has asked the FTC to investigate whether the airline industry is data mining consumer personal information in order to charge them airfares based on things like income and purchasing behaviors.

About Us

Trusted by 45'000+ hotel marketers around the globe, Hotelmarketing'com satisfies your professional appetite for intelligence: news and information that is changing hotel marketing today, curated from hundreds of sources, editorially distilled into a must-read briefing and delivered every business day straight to your inbox.